A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words
by mercurywrites
Summary: Near the end of Harry's first year, Severus receives a letter from Hagrid, and memories from the past resurface. Will Severus share his piece of Lily with Harry, or selfishly keep it to himself?


_Severus,_

_I'm making a scrapbook of James and Lily for Harry. Figured he ought to know a bit more about his parents. Poor boy doesn't have a single picture of them, I doubt if he has any idea what they look like. I remember you being friends with Lily in your earlier years at Hogwarts, and I was wondering if you have any pictures you'd like to give. I understand if you don't have any, or if you don't want to. Hear you don't get on too well with the boy._

_Think about it._

_Hagrid_

Severus clenched the parchment in his fist, violently crunching it into a ball. The oaf dared ask him for pictures of Lily, dared intrude on his privacy like this? And all for that Potter boy...the child was insufferable, the spitting image of his father, in both looks and personality. Except for his eyes... Viciously, Severus tossed Hagrid's letter into the burning fire and watched it curling into the flames. Smirking with slight satisfaction, he turned and stalked back to his desk, where he returned to grading those imbecile second years' essays.

However, he found that his sarcastic critiques were only half-hearted, as he could barely focus on the words before him. Angrily, he threw his quill onto the desk, splattering ink all over Annie Smitherson's essay – it was better that way anyway – and let out a soft shout of frustration. Sighing, he whispered the series of incantations that would open the bottom drawer of his desk, and with a snap, the drawer unlocked and slid open, revealing dozens of smiling Lily's waving up at him. As usual, Severus felt his heart clench tightly within his chest. Desperately pushing his feelings of painful longing aside, he slid out of his chair and knelt down beside the drawer, reaching his hand in to rifle through the images.

He pushed Lily after Lily aside, until he found a particularly beautiful photo of her towards the bottom of the pile. She had been fifteen at the time, the summer before their falling out. She was sitting on a swing in their playground, gently gliding back and forth, her deep red hair rippling around her face with every movement. She was beaming at the camera, her brilliant green eyes sparkling with mirth.

"_Come on, Sev, take the picture already!"_

He could still hear her voice in his mind, even after all this time, could still hear her laughter tinkling like hundreds of tiny bells dancing in the wind…

"Enough!" he snapped suddenly, his voice reverberating against the cold stone walls of the empty classroom. Abruptly he stood, slamming the drawer shut with a sharp, well-aimed kick of his foot. His toe throbbed slightly as he sat back down in his chair, a pain which he welcomed, and he dipped his quill back into the inkwell, so harshly that drops of ink sprayed from the jar and landed like obsidian raindrops on his desk. Not even bothering to clean up the mess, he angrily began scrawling on a particularly bad essay, his comments twice as vicious as normal.

Three hours later, the essays on his desk were so covered in black ink and cruel words that the original writing was nearly indecipherable. Severus left one last particularly nasty comment on the final essay in the pile, questioning whether or not there were brain-eating parasites living in Jason Norwich's head, before taking the pile and throwing it violently to the side of his desk, where it would remain until morning. He leaned forward, elbows propped against the rough, splintery wood, and rested his chin on his hands. There was nothing left to occupy his mind now but his memories.

"_Look what I bought, Sev!"_

"_What did you buy?"_

"_It's a camera! A real wizard camera – the pictures move and everything!"_

"_Of course they move. That's what pictures do."_

"_Not Muggle pictures, not the pictures that my parents take—come on! Let's go play around with it."_

Severus slammed his fist down heavily on the desk and sat there with his head lowered, breathing heavily, for a long while. Finally, he leaned down and reached back into the drawer, his hand disappearing into the abyss. It reemerged holding the picture. Lily was still gliding back and forth, smiling brightly, oblivious to the suffering of the man watching her. He straightened, bringing the picture between both hands, and leaned forward with his arms lying flat across the desk.

Entranced, he sat there for what could have been two minutes or two hours as he stared into Lily's twinkling emerald eyes, imagining that he were standing in the middle of the playground, poising the camera, instead of sitting in the damp dungeon classroom surrounded by jars of pickled potion ingredients and ungraded essays. He could nearly feel the sun on the back of his neck and the sharp grass scratching against his bare feet. He could nearly smell the unmistakable scent of freshly mowed grass wafting to them on the breeze from a neighboring lawn.

But before long, reality snapped back into place. Slowly, Severus stood from the desk, the picture still clenched protectively in his hands.

And before he could dissuade himself, before he could even fully comprehend what he was doing, Severus' feet were pulling him from the classroom, through the dungeon hallway, up the stairs, and out the door into the darkness of the night.

All was silent and still. The very air around him seemed to be suspended in time, watching. Waiting.

He could hear Lily's laughter in the silence.

Hesitating for only a moment, Severus continued walking in the direction of Hagrid's hut. He was thankful he didn't meet with any colleagues patrolling the grounds or troublemaking students cavorting about after hours. He was hardly in the mood to be bothered with anyone tonight.

There was a distinct tightening in his chest as he approached the gamekeeper's home, and he fought the momentary urge to turn and run back to the castle, back to the safety of his dungeons. Shaking his head as if to dispel such mutinous thoughts, he pushed onward towards the hut.

He fought back another desperate urge to flee as he lifted his hand and knocked sharply on the door. The moment his hand made contact with the wood, a deep, vicious barking came from within, and Severus recoiled. He had never been particularly fond of animals, and, though Hagrid's monstrous mutt was certainly no Fluffy, he was still unduly wary of Fang.

He heard a faint shuffling behind the door before it swung open to reveal Hagrid, looking disgruntled in a grey nightshirt that might have been a bed sheet in a previous life. Severus noted, not without amusement, that he must have woken the man. "'Ey, Severus," Hagrid muttered, rubbing sleep from his eyes with the back of an enormous, hairy hand. "What're yeh doin' here this time o' the night?"

Wordlessly, Severus held out the photo to Hagrid, who stared at it in confusion before understanding dawned in his eyes. "Severus," he said softly, taking the picture from the other man's outstretched hand. His eyes looked wet with tears, Severus thought disgustedly, though it was hard to tell in the darkness. "Yeh didn' have ter do this, yeh know."

Lifting his eyes to Hagrid's face, Severus murmured, "You tell no one." There was no mistaking the warning in his voice. The two sets of black eyes, one warm and the other an icy sort of cold, met in a silent understanding.

Hagrid nodded as Severus turned on his heel and glided off into the night, dissolving into the darkness as if he were part of it.

* * *

><p><strong><em>I had an unusually hard time writing this one, so please leave a review and let me know how it turned out!<em>**


End file.
